David Adamo is known for minimalist artistic installations of wooden utilitarian objects, whittled down to fragility and accompanied by piles of wood shavings.

David was born in 1979 in New York, USA and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. David Adamo is a remarkably industrious, inventive and versatile sculptor.

Untitled (Music for Strings IV) (2010), for example, pairs a wall-lodged sledgehammer with darts, spindly canes, and a deconstructed violin case. Other works comprise baseball bats, axes, knives, and other typically masculine implements, which have earned him a reputation for violence that he refutes: “I don’t necessarily think about aggressive things when I’m in the studio…although I do work myself into a sort of frenzy,” he explains.

Mr. Adamo’s hip-high works are considerably smaller than real termite mounds. They have granular surfaces in a lovely range of earth colors and profiles like unusual rock formations in the American Southwest. While exceptionally appealing as objects, they also invite meditation on evolution and the amazingly complex living systems that these busy creatures make for themselves.

These days Adamo is working on a larger scale and trading in figurative subjects for more abstract ones, such as construction beams. According to New York Times critic David Colman, “What elevates Adamo’s work above the mass of young conceptualists is not how cerebral it is, but how personal and emotional.”

His own beaverish productivity and unpredictable ingenuity leave you wondering what he’ll do next.